Alexander Schapiro

Alexander M. Schapiro (1882–1946) was a Russian Jewish anarcho-syndicalist militant active in the international anarchist movement.

Schapiro was born in 1882 in Rostov-on-Don, and as a child was taken to Turkey where he attended the French school in Istanbul. As a result, he could speak Russian, French, and Turkish, and would later master German and English. By the age of eleven, he was studying the works of anarchist theorists Peter Kropotkin, Jean Grave and Élisée Reclus. After studying biology at the Sorbonne in Paris with the intention of embarking on a career in medicine, he was forced to drop out for financial reasons, and joined his father in London where they were active in the London Anarchist Federation.

In London, he was a member of the Arbeter Fraynd collective, and a delegate of the Jewish Anarchist Federation of London at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, at which he was elected one of three secretaries and became one of five members of a bureau calling itself the Anarchist International. He was a signatory to the International Anarchist Manifesto against the First World War issued in London in 1915. He was the secretary in the London branch of the Anarchist Red Cross, which provided aid to imprisoned anarchists (in Russia especially), working alongside Peter Kropotkin, Varlaam Cherkezov and Rudolf Rocker. Schapiro was one of the few anarchist friends of Kropotkin not to cut his ties with the anarchist communist theorist over the latter's role in the pro-war Manifesto of the Sixteen.

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